Climate Letter #1986

For me, the thing that is most fun about doing this work is studying the weather maps and figuring out all the reasons for why any particular daily temperature anomaly happens to be whatever it is, as reported. I am convinced that it all boils down to adding up all the things that make temperatures higher than the historical average and subtracting those that make them lower. The tricky part, first of all, comes from gaining the ability to recognize all of the different factors that can make a difference, in either direction. They are not listed anywhere that I know of. That’s a real challenge, and not an easy one. It would take community effort, over time, to create such a list and get it right, with the focus always being on frequency and importance of each factor. Once the list is ready the other big problem is how to come up with the right numbers, for any given situation, that will need to be added or subtracted in order to get the correct answer. Whatever guidelines are available, every anomaly will require some individual effort to figure out, and some ability to make compromises here and there. The correct total is known from the start, and must be assumed to be accurate even though there is always the possibility of technical errors in its making. This entire effort, as a human practice, is still in a pioneering stage, full of trial and error as well as generating a flow of new revelations. I find it a fun thing to do and invite others to pick it up as a favorite hobby of their own.

Starting this activity from scratch several years ago, it quickly became clear that not many factors would ever be able to supply the kind of numbers big enough to make a significant contribution to reported anomalies in the double-digit range. Almost every day a fair number of these appeared on the maps, both warm and cold. As regular readers already know, it didn’t take long for me to realize that whenever they appeared, no matter the location, something unusual would also make an appearance on the precipitable water (PW) map at the same location. With a scale running from zero to 100 on hand for reference it was easy to see that the biggest cold anomalies were always associated with relatively low numbers on the scale and warm anomalies with higher ones. The number crunching that followed quickly led to the conclusion that any double in PW values was commonly associated with a difference of around 8C in surface temperatures, assuming all other temperature-affecting factors to be about equal before and after the change occurred. Later, the 8C was adjusted to 10C, the entire tropical zone of consistently high temperatures was dropped from consideration, and the need to know more about actual differences and refinements caused by “other factors” had to be dealt with.

Here is what really generated my interest in PW, prompting me to learn everything I could possibly find out about it:  How could it have so much power, which appears to be the case, as a source of temperature increases?  Plus, how could its intensity double and redouble over time periods as brief as a day or two?  Those were the two biggest issues.  Given the lines of investigation which establish the fact that water vapor has an abundance greenhouse energy production capability, more so than any of the other greenhouse gases, I had nothing indicating a number as high as 10C per double apart from what nature itself was telling us in a very direct way, over and over again, through the collected data.  The second question could actually be answered in a more satisfactory way, by piecing together and interpreting all of imagery pertaining to the upper level of the troposphere and its unique wind system in the mid-to-upper latitudes of each hemisphere.  There is ample evidence showing how substantial quantities of PW entire each of those zones every day and how these quantities progress from their points of entry over what is only a short period of time.  All such quantities are destined to depart from the zones and return to Earth as modes of precipitation over an apparent time span of less than ten days.   I never have found any reason to believe the greenhouse energy powers inherent in these quantities of PW was somehow lost or suspended during the days of their presence in these zones.  I think it is constantly added to the similar powers of the PW in the lower atmosphere, in proportion to the bulk weight of the PW at each level, which is typically quite uneven due to a unique set of rules determining its method of distribution in the upper wind system.  This is a description of what makes Carl’s theory so unorthodox when compared with the teachings of science. 

Carl